Large organizations such as pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations have a massive amount of information available to them. This may include, for example, ongoing and historical clinical trials and studies, treatment guidelines, patient information, patents, research documents, external research literature, news articles, as well as information on the web. Most of this information is in the form of unstructured or semi-structured text (e.g. XML). The vast quantities make it hard to read, even with the help of a search engine to prune down the number of relevant documents.
Conventional systems do not provide results directly from the structured or unstructured text in a format that can be used directly for decision making. Search engines do not provide any structure, other than the structure in the original document. Information extraction systems do not use an index, so cannot provide fast interactive querying, nor do they allow a flexible mix of constraints based on linguistic constructions and the structure of the document.